Less Driving On Campus

EditorialThe Hartford Courant

Because of climate change and energy insecurity, a major policy challenge of the first half of the 21st century will be to maintain mobility with less energy consumption. Put another way, we all need to drive less.

One place where this is being done, with notable success, is college campuses.

Over the past two decades, colleges and universities have increasingly taken steps to reduce driving. "These efforts are working well — saving money for universities, improving the quality of life in college towns and giving today's students experience in living life without depending on a personal car," according to a study just released by the research group ConnPIRG.

To reduce car use, universities are providing free or discounted transit passes, building new bike/ped paths and creating programs to promote bicycle use. A fare-free transit service at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill helped increase the percentage of students using transit to commute to campus from 21 to 53 percent from 1997 to 2011. A series of initiatives at the University of Wisconsin in Madison has 22 percent of students biking to campus in good weather, up from 12 percent in 2006, the study says.

The benefit for the colleges are cleaner air, less land used for parking lots, support for local transit systems and better town-gown relations. It may also explain why young people for several years have been moving to walkable cities and doing less driving. There's a lesson for policy-makers.